How did Paul go from being a man consumed with his own status and behavior to one who could say, “To live is Christ”? Or from a man who saw death as punishment to one who saw death as gain? And furthermore, how could we learn to live like Paul did?
Podcast: Download (Duration: 56:14 — 38.6MB)
Downloads
Notes Transcript Video Audio iTunesGrace Fellowship Church
Jon Stallsmith
Series: Philippians: The “What Ifs” of Faith
October 6, 2013
What If We Knew the Truth about Eternity?
Philippians 1:19-30
All right, if you have a Bible, open it up to Philippians 1. If you don’t have a Bible or you don’t have a sheet for notes, slip up your hand, and we will give you whatever you need…between those two options. Philippians 1 is right after Ephesians, toward the end of your Bibles.
If you remember, a couple of weeks ago, last time we were in the book of Philippians (I was gone in Kosovo last week with D.J. and a small team there), and we were just remembering Paul’s situation. He was in these circumstances where he’s in prison. It’s a difficult setting, but rather than looking at his own feelings, interpreting his situation, and then saying, “God, help!” what we saw with Paul is that always he looks first to the Lord. That’s what’s encapsulated in that word, the gospel, that Jesus is the true King.
Whenever he’s trying to figure out his circumstances, interpret his situation, figure out what’s going on around him, he looks first to Jesus as the King. That’s the defining reality. Then through that lens he sees, “Okay, what’s going on in this situation?” and then he moves finally to his own feelings and how he’s doing in the midst of that.
So it’s incredibly important we imitate Paul’s pattern, learning how to look. Jesus as the King, that’s the gospel, the One who died and rose again has ascended now at the right hand of the Father and over everything. That impacts the way we see what’s going on around us and of course has a huge impact on how we feel in the midst of it.
Because of that perspective, Paul is able to, even in the most unlikely of circumstances, say, “Hey, I will rejoice. I’m going to be full of joy even though I am locked up in prison. I’m a guy who likes to be out there, having adventures, sharing the gospel. I’m locked up, locked down. I’m still going to rejoice right here.” That was his perspective.
As we continue, Paul is going to give us a little bit more insight into his interpretation of his surroundings and how he is seeing the world. If we could learn to see the world correctly as Jesus’ followers, it would have such a huge impact on the way we live.
I was impressed (reminded is maybe a better word) of how important it is to understand your circumstances accurately. This week when were in Kosovo, we were there, and it was kind of a unique trip. Each year, if you’ve been tracking with us, we host Kosovar students and host families here for about a month, and then we send teams over in the summertime to do English camps with their students for about a month.
Out of this exchange have come all sorts of wonderful relationships and conversations, and families have connected, and people have come to understand who Jesus is fully. It has just been a wonderful partnership. One of the reasons that partnership works is because the mayor in the government over there really loves this idea of cultural exchange. In fact, when we brought the students over last fall, it was their government in the little town of Suhareka who paid like $40,000 to fly all 21 students over here. It’s was amazing.
Of course, we gave sacrificially as a community also to be able to help them with their tuition expenses. It is really a sweet partnership. As it has developed, one thing they really wanted over there is that we be sister cities. So this trip was all about officially christening the sister-city relationship between Suhareka, Kosovo, and Lilburn, Georgia. So that’s what we did.
Johnny Crist, the mayor of Lilburn, comes over here to Grace. He’s an attender here. So he helped to facilitate the sister cityhood. We got to have lots of big banquets and we talked with lots of politicians. It’s kind of a new world for me. I don’t really understand politics very well, but I learned a lot.
The first night we were there, and we were eating with the mayor and his whole entourage. It was a royal feast. They were bringing out all of the traditional Albanian foods. They call steak mussel. I don’t know why they translate it that way, but they kept saying, “Would you like some mussel?” We were like, “That does not look little things in shells; that looks like a big, honking steak.” But finally it turned out that we understood it was not like mussels the way we say; it was literally the muscle of an animal. It just changes the taste in your mouth. But, an amazing feast.
Part of the reason we were there this time of the year is because it coincides with the harvest season. So it was grape season, and the weekend we were there they call Festari. All of the local farmers bring in their crops from around in the areas and they display them in the city. It’s a wonderful time. So this region is particularly well known for grapes.
D.J. and I were sitting there at this table, and there’s a proverb that says when you sit at the king’s table, hold a knife to your throat so you don’t eat too much. It’s just important. But this was like the first king’s table we’d sat at for awhile, and we forgot that proverb. So when the grapes came out, we started pounding the grapes. They were so good. They were delicious.
When we eat a grape from Kroger’s, it’s nice. It tastes like one thing. It just tastes like a grape. But these, the bunches of fresh grapes. You just put it in your mouth, and first it’d be sweet, and then it’d be rich, and then it’d be a little bitter, and then it would be like sweet again. It was like four or five flavors just exploding in your mouth. It was amazing. We have to get some grapes like that around here.
But D.J. and I probably ate about a pound to a pound and a half of grapes each for desert at the meal. So a lot of grapes. It was one of those things, because you break off a bunch and you think, “Okay, that’s enough,” but then you’re tearing, and like the whole thing comes off. You’re like, “Well, I guess I have to eat all of these.” So you eat that whole bunch. Then there’s that half that’s still there, but it looks kind of pathetic by itself, so I have to eat those too. We ate a lot of grapes.
We went back to the hotel, and we went to sleep. About 4:00 a.m. that first night after eating all those grapes, D.J. gets up. I hear him get up, and he goes into the bathroom, and he starts throwing up. That’s never a good sign, especially overseas. So I get up to go check on him, and I poke my head into the bathroom, and I see that his vomit is blood red.
I thought, “Oh no, this is a bad situation. We don’t want to be in this country with internal bleeding or something ruptured inside.” Vomiting blood is bad wherever you are, but particularly in another country. So I’m starting to run through contingency scenarios in my mind. “Where can we go? Where’s a hospital?”
I’m looking again, and I go, “Wait a second. It’s not blood red; it’s more like grape red. That’s been dyed by the grapes. Thank God that is not his innards coming out.” That’s not a very pleasant story, but D.J., to his credit, had one of the best attitudes of anyone I’ve ever met throwing up. He’s just a positive guy all around. I can’t believe how happy he was.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, man! I’m fine.” [Throwing up].
“No, really. Do you feel okay?”
“I think it’s just the grapes.” [Throwing up]. He’s so positive! I’m never like that throwing up.
So anyway, the importance of interpreting your situation correctly is huge. That happens not just when you’re looking about what’s coloring this guy’s upchuck, but also when we’re looking at our own lives and figuring out, “What’s going on around us?” and, “What really matters?” or, “What doesn’t matter?” and, “Where should we put our emphases?” and, “How do we make our decisions?” and, “How do we interpret our lives? How do we see the world as it’s going on around us?”
To tell you the truth, this passage from Paul gives us such keen insight into the way he did that. So let’s read together. We’ll start in the end of verse 18 actually just to pick up a little bit from where we were last week. We’re going to read through verse 30, because he talks about his own process and then he helps them think through the way they should interpret the world, their lives around them, to understand their situation.
So Paul says, “…Christ is proclaimed [in all situations], and in that I rejoice. Yes, and I will rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance, as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith, so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus, because of my coming to you again.”
“I’m going to visit you.” This is where he starts telling them now how to interpret their situations. He says, “Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, and not frightened in anything by your opponents.
This is a clear sign to them of their destruction, but of your salvation, and that from God. For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have.” (Philippians 1:18-30)
Famous words. If you’ve been around church much, you’ve almost certainly heard someone preach about Paul’s great statement here, “For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” You may even have a camp tee shirt with that on it. If you wear that camp tee shirt around, people look at it and they say, “That’s a little strange. I don’t understand it.” We don’t always think through our camp tee shirts, but they’re meaningful to us.
To live is Christ and to die is gain. What do you make of that? Could you say that with Paul? Could you say it with the same conviction Paul does? Do we have the ability to see our situations around us? Do we understand what’s going on well enough to really be able to look and say, “Wow, everything in life is for Christ, and death would be gain”? It’s a stretching thought.
But to me, it’s even more stretching when I think about the man who is saying it, when I think about Paul. Because to tell you the truth, most of the time I probably personally could not really fully say, “To live is Christ and to die is gain.” I’d probably say personally, “Yeah, to live is mostly Christ, but I know I get distracted.” I know I’d probably say, “Yeah, to die is gain, but I’m still a little worried about death, to be completely transparent.”
So how do you get there from wherever we are, where we’re living and breathing, going through our lives, to this place where Paul seems to be with such firm conviction, where his life is Christ and death is gain? How does that happen? If we ask that question about Paul specifically, we see the interesting history of a man who did not always define life that way and did not always define death that way.
We have a few pictures of what Paul’s personality was like before he met the Lord. If you read about Paul, he reflects on this in several of his own letters. We see in the book of Acts a brief, few snippets about Paul’s life before he met Christ. If we look at those, we can see Paul really would’ve said, “To live is not Christ.” It was something totally else.
He also would’ve said, “To die is not gain.” He would’ve said, “It’s something totally else.” What would he have said before he met Jesus? What would he have said? Well, to live for Paul was… Back before he met Jesus and understood who Jesus was, he tells us in Philippians 3, starting in verse 4.
We’ll get there in a couple of weeks, but he says, “…I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.” (Philippians 3:4-6)
He’s reflecting on his own mindset before he met the Lord. He says, “My old mindset was all about being totally confident in the flesh.” In 2 Corinthians 11:22, he talks about this again. He says, “Hey, are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they offspring of Abraham? So am I.” He’s confident. His old way of thinking was confidence in his flesh, confidence in himself.
He talks about how he was educated by the best, Gamaliel, and he learned so much from this guy. His confidence was in his own ability to learn. So for Paul, before he met the Lord, he would’ve said, “To live is confidence in myself. I have to have everything squared away. I have to keep the law perfectly. I have to be the right guy. I have to be in the right crowd. I have to do all the right things.” For him, to live is maintaining all of this stuff around him. He had a lot of energy. He had a lot of zeal. To live is maintaining his confidence in the flesh all around him.
And to die, before Paul came to know the Lord, was also something different. When we first meet Paul in the book of Acts, it’s at the stoning of Stephen. You remember Stephen was this great believer, and he was martyred, he was stoned, for following Jesus. It’s a harrowing scene as the people gather around him. They begin stoning him. But it’s quite beautiful also. It says Stephen has a vision. He sees the Lord standing at the right hand of the Father. So he dies.
What we see for Paul, in Acts 7:58, it says, “Then they cast [Stephen] out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul.” Who would later be known as Paul, our friend here we’re talking about. It says, “And as they were stoning Stephen, he called out, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ And falling to his knees he cried out with a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ And when he had said this, he fell asleep.”
That’s a way of saying he died. Listen to this. “And Saul approved of his execution.” (Acts 7:58-8:1) Saul was glad this guy Stephen, this Jesus follower, was dead. In Galatians 1:13, Paul is talking. He’s reflecting back on his former life. He says, “For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it.” (Galatians 1:13)
We even pick up Paul’s story again in Acts 9. This is when he’s beginning his walk to the road to Damascus. It says, “But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.” (Acts 9:1-2)
So for Paul, to live was confidence in the flesh, and to die was punishment. That was his perspective…particularly if someone was following Jesus. But he actively pursued the death of his opponents because he felt like they deserved to be punished like that. So what happened? What transformed this guy whose life was so invested in maintaining his fleshy qualifications and whose outlook on his situation is that life is confidence in the flesh and death is punishment? What happened to him so now he’s saying, “Life is Christ; death is gain”?
The short answer is that he met Jesus. He had a life-altering encounter with the living Christ. Paul’s perspective of life and death was radically transformed when Jesus appeared to him. I’m just going to read you this story from Acts 9, picking up in verse 3. It says, “Now as [Saul] went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven shone around him. And falling to the ground he heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’
And he said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’ The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one. Saul rose from the ground, and although his eyes were opened, he saw nothing. So they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. And for three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.” (Acts 9:3-9)
Saul, breathing threats and murder, met Jesus. The Lord appeared to him. The Lord spoke to him. It’s amazing because of the impact of this encounter. Here’s Paul: Life is confidence in the flesh, but he met Someone so powerful that his flesh was rendered functionless. His eyes no longer worked.
The things he was so confident in, the things that were defining his life, when he met Jesus, he met One so powerful that that was like small potatoes. “I can’t even see anymore.” Death, as punishment… It’s interesting, because Paul knew, perhaps even had seen Jesus died on the cross. Everyone in Jerusalem knew Jesus had been killed on a cross. The debate was over whether or not he was resurrected.
So here’s Paul walking along, and he has this idea that death is punishment, and yet he has an encounter with One who had been dead and is now alive. Totally transforming death. Totally victorious over death. Death is no longer powerful. This encounter was so significant in Paul’s life that it’s repeated twice more in the book of Acts. It’s the most repeated story in the book of Acts, actually, apart from the death and resurrection of Jesus.
I think we have to be careful not to underestimate the power of a direct encounter with the living God. We can’t look past how significant it is when God gives us a moment of insight, when the Lord reveals himself to us, and how that moment can so dramatically alter the way we see the world.
Paul went from being a guy who said, “Yeah, life is all about me and my own confidence in what I can do,” to a guy who said, “No, life is all about the Lord, who appeared to me on the road.” And, “Death is all about punishment, something to be avoided, make sure I walk the right way so I don’t end up in the same boat as all these other heretics,” to now, “Death is actually the opportunity to be with the Lord I saw.”
If we’re asking the question, “How do we go from wherever we are in our definition of life?” If we’re talking about our own definition of life, maybe you’re saying right now, “If I were to look at my life, life is mostly work. It’s not Christ; it’s mostly work.” Or, “Life is my friends. Life is my fame, my prestige, my reputation. Life is my wealth.” Or even, “Life is my family.”
You look at your life and go, “Wow,” or if you’re very honest in assessing your life, “My definition would not be that life is Christ. It’d be something else. But I really would like to be in the same boat with Paul.” Life is Christ. For to me to live is Christ. How do you get there? Or maybe with death.
Maybe you’re looking at death and you’re going, “Wow, death is scary. I’m not sure about death.” From that place, how do you get to the place where Paul is? Death is gain. Like confidence. “Okay, this is actually going to be a good thing.” There’s nothing to be afraid of in death. How do you get there?
Well, the way Paul went from one place to that place was through an encounter with the living Lord. Through the Bible actually, people’s whole perspective on life, their interpretation of the situation around them, the way they’re feeling, their understanding of the supernatural world and really the way things are hinge on these moments when God shows up in their lives.
For some of us, maybe we’ve had that. Maybe you can remember back to a time when the Lord just worked powerfully in your life. Some of us just need to rekindle that and reconnect to that reality. We’ve maybe let that drift from us. Or maybe for some of us it has been so long since we’ve had a real authentic meeting with God that it’s time to turn our hearts that direction once again and remember the purely transformative power of being in the manifest presence of God and him speaking with us.
Now I’m not talking about a faith that’s truly based on experience. Obviously our faith is based on the Word of God, on the power of God’s Spirit. Jesus talked about this in John 20 with Thomas. Remember, Thomas was the guy who didn’t believe the Lord had been resurrected. He said, “Until I touch him and feel his scars, I’m not going to believe he is alive again.” He came in and he saw the Lord and he touched his side and he felt the scars in his hands and he said, “Oh, my Lord and my God!”
Thomas believed after the experience. Here’s what Jesus said, “Have you believed because you’ve seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Jesus says, “There’s a blessing for people who have faith to follow me even if they haven’t had this blinding encounter with me.”
But at the same time, in John 6, he says, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” So any of us who have an authentic seed of faith, any of us who follow the Lord have had that moment of rebirth, and the gift of the Spirit has come because the Father has in some way shown up in our lives. He has drawn us. He has appeared to us. He has encountered us.
So as I’ve been reading this passage for really the last two weeks and convicted honestly about life and death and my view of both, I’ve thought about Paul a lot. I’ve thought about how powerful it was that the Lord appeared to Paul. I’ve thought, “If I’m going to get these definitions straight, if I’m really going to deep down in my heart have clarity and conviction, I need to just meet with the Lord. I need to seek his presence. I need to know he’s there.”
This is something Paul did too. As you read through the rest of Paul’s letters, it wasn’t like that was the only time when Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus. He writes in 2 Corinthians 1 about when times got so bad in Asia, they were so utterly burdened beyond their strength that they despaired of life itself. He was low in that situation.
We don’t know exactly what it was that was happening. It may even have been the time we talked about in the book of Acts when they were prevented from going into Asia. Some surmise that Paul became extremely sick. We don’t know exactly what happened, but he says, “Things got so bad that we despaired of life itself.” Then in verse 10, he says, “God delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us.”
Paul was in this place where he was despairing of life. His perspective is not so clear. Life is Christ; death is gain. He’s starting to get beaten down. What happened? God delivered him. God showed up in his life. The famous passage, 2 Corinthians 12, the thorn in the flesh, Paul talks about this experience also.
He says, “…a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me.” (2 Corinthians 12:7-8) Look at what Paul does. In the time when he’s afflicted most, in the time when he’s tempted most to lose his clarity about what life is and what death is, when that thorn is causing him to ask all kinds of questions, “Where’s this coming from? Why me? Why now? Why does it hurt so much?” look what he does.
“Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.'” (2 Corinthians 12:8-9) Sometimes you’ll talk to some folks. If they’ve been around church for awhile and they’re going through a tough time or struggling in a certain area or something, maybe they’ll just use that phrase, “It’s just a thorn in my flesh.”
If you know your Bible, you know it’s a reference back to this passage. If you don’t know your Bible and you’re still wondering why they’re talking about a “Death is gain” tee shirt, why they’re wearing that, and they say, “It’s just a thorn in my flesh,” you’re like, “What in the world is this guy talking about?”
But if you know your Bible a bit, and if you look past the “Death is gain” tee shirt, and they say, “A thorn in the flesh,” sometimes you just wonder, “Okay, maybe it is your thorn in the flesh, but have you heard from God about the thorn in the flesh? Have you had a word from the Lord to help you understand what’s going on here?”
Because for Paul, when he’s in that situation, when he’s losing clarity about his definitions of life and death and everything else, he went to the Lord. He didn’t get an answer, so he went to the Lord again. He didn’t get an answer; he went to the Lord again. “Three times I sought the Lord. I sought the Lord until he spoke to me.”
Then the Lord showed up. “The Lord spoke to me.” He heard clearly, “This is so you would understand what it means for my power to be made perfect in your weakness. I’m going to sustain you.” He needed that word from the Lord. He needed that encounter from God. He needed that moment just when he was really communing with God himself.
The Bible is full of these stories. Psalm 73: Maybe you remember Asaph. He’s the psalmist in that psalm. He’s looking at the world around him, and he’s just disgusted. His basic complaint to God is that it looks like all the really wicked people are having a great time, and they’re very rich, and they keep getting fatter. Back then, it was a good thing to be fat, because it meant you ate good food. Now it’s a bad thing to be fat, but back then, he was like, “The rich are getting really fat. Why, God?”
He’s struggling with this understanding. What’s life about? What’s death about? Do you know what he says? In verse 16, he says, “But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task…” “On my own, I couldn’t figure this out. I couldn’t interpret the situation well on my own.” “…until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end.” (Psalm 73:16-17)
Asaph can’t figure out his definitions of life and death and what’s going on around him, until he steps into the sanctuary of God, the place of God’s presence, and then something happened. He doesn’t even tell us exactly what he discerned. He simply says, “When I turned my heart and I turned my mind to the presence of the Lord, the Lord met me, and I understood, and I had clarity, and it transformed me.” This moment of encounter with the living God changed his perspective.
Over and over and over again. “Seek the Lord and his strength; seek his presence continually!” (Psalm 105:4) “Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him. Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord; his going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.” (Hosea 6:1-3)
There’s this call from the prophet Hosea. “Hey, in this situation, we’re broken down. We can’t quite make sense of what’s going on around us. Let us seek the Lord.” The promise there is that his going out is as certain as the dawn. He will respond as surely as the sun will rise in the morning. He will come to us as surely as the rain comes in the springtime.
We can be assured when we turn our hearts to God…maybe it’ll take three times, maybe it’ll take 10 times…but in those moments when our definitions and our clarity and our understanding of life around us are wavering, what we really need is to meet with God. The promise in James is that we draw near to him, he will draw near to us.
I can think in my own life, when I’m feeling distracted, discouraged, joyless, depressed. I’ve tried all sorts of different solutions to fix it, but it’s really not until I get to the place where I meet with the Lord, praying, sometimes worshiping in the congregation and sometimes it’s over the Scriptures, sometimes it has even been in a dream… I’ve never had a visual vision of Jesus. I know some people who have, and that would be wonderful, but I guess I’m still in the same category as, “Blessed are those who believe without seeing.”
But we all know what it’s like when you have that sense in your spirit. Even though your physical body maybe can’t comprehend or apprehend what’s going on, there’s a sense in your spirit that God is near, that he shows up, that he breaks in with that shining bright light on our road, and it changes everything to the point where suddenly our definition of life goes back to where it should be and our understanding of death goes back to where it should be.
So for us, maybe one of the encouragements from this text of Scripture, if you’re wrestling with these things or you would really like to be more with Paul, to live is Christ and to die is gain, if you’d like to get closer to that, my encouragement would be seek the Lord. Seek an encounter with the Lord. Meet with him. Enter into his sanctuary. Turn your face toward his face and see what he does. See how his Spirit blows through your life. See how he may lift and encourage, break through the dark clouds to restore clarity in your understanding.
For Paul, this is so real that he literally cannot really work out whether he’d prefer to remain living with the people around him, because it means fruitful labor, or whether he’d rather be with Christ. The thing here is not that Paul has a death wish. He’s not like desiring, “Oh, I just want to be dead so I could be in heaven with the Lord. That would be awesome.” It’s not that.
Do you know what it is? It’s that he’s so convicted of the beauty and the wonder and the joy and the power of Jesus, he’s so convinced of the reality of heaven, of the reality of the eternal kingdom of God, of which we will all be a part in that great glorious day, he’s so convinced of that, it’s so real to him, that he’s like, “If I die, that would be awesome!” He knows it.
He’s not holding onto his life, clinging to his confidence in the flesh like he once was. Now it’s like, “Nope, I’m living in a new reality. I’m living in a new place. I’ve seen the Lord. He has worked in my life. He has encountered me. I’ve seen his power. I’ve seen his miracles. I’ve seen the truth of his resurrection. So now I’m in this place where I am truly hard-pressed between the two. I’m in this place where I can see the benefits of both sides, and either one, however it works out, is okay.” That’s really where most of us are called to live.
That’s where he’s calling the Philippians to live, to live in that place between life and death, to live in the place between the present and eternity, to live as real citizens of the kingdom. That’s what he goes into as he’s exhorting them. In verse 27, he says, “Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ…” (Philippians 1:27)
It’s an unfortunate translation. The word only, when he starts the little section here, means focus in. This is the one thing to keep your minds and your hearts focused on. Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ. Depending on the translation you have in front of you (I’m reading out of the English Standard Version), there’s a little footnote next to it that says, “Only behave as citizens worthy.”
For whatever reason, the translators have sort of dropped the word citizen out of this translation. That’s true in a couple of different ones I had written down here. The NIV says, “Conduct yourselves in a manner worthy.” The NASB says, “Conduct yourselves.” King James says, “Let your conversation.” It doesn’t really talk about citizens.
But in the Greek, the original word there actually comes straight from the original Greek word for citizen. He’s saying, “Hey, act like a citizen.” As you’re understanding life and death and the truth about both, now live as a citizen. The reason it’s unfortunate we lose the word citizen in this translation, with the English Standard, is because for the Philippians, citizenship was really important. Citizenship for the Philippians was part of their identity in the Roman Empire.
If you follow or trace the history of the city of Philippi, they had special status from the Roman emperor. After Octavian, in the 60s BC, won several large battles right in that region, he wanted that city to be really closely connected to the Roman Empire. So what he did was resettle the city with lots of ex-Roman soldiers. He said, “You guys were soldiers. You served in the Roman military, served in the Roman government. I’ll give you land here.”
So there are all these true-bred Romans living in Philippi. They gave it this status of ius Italicum, which is Latin, which means basically this city will be administered according to the laws of Rome itself, which was not always the case in every city in the ancient Roman Empire. There were only a handful of cities that had this special status.
We know citizenship is really important in Philippi because if we remember back to Acts 16, it’s when Paul gets arrested for casting the demon out of the little girl. They beat him with rods. He goes to prison. They’re singing in the prison. The prison ruptures open as they’re singing. The jailor is ready to kill himself because he thinks all of the guys are going to escape. Paul says, “No, no, no. We’re all here.” So this jailor and his family all come to the Lord. The next morning, Paul brings up the fact he has been unjustly imprisoned and beaten without a trial.
Why is that a problem? Because he’s a true citizen. He’s a Roman citizen. Everybody goes, “He’s a citizen! We shouldn’t have done that to a citizen. Uh-oh.” So they’re like, “Hey, why don’t you just get out of town? Just don’t worry about it. Just pretend like this never happened.” Paul was like, “No, get the officials of the city to come down here and talk to me directly.” So he forces the officials to come and talk to him. Paul really sticks it to them because they have denied his citizenship.
In Philippi, citizenship is incredibly important. We see it right there in Acts 16, and here again he’s referencing. He’ll talk about it again at the end of Philippians 3, this idea of citizenship. Why is citizenship important? To conduct yourselves as citizens, to live as citizens worthy of the gospel? Well, the thing about a citizen is they have both rights and responsibilities.
What we saw with Paul in Acts 16 is he was exercising his rights as a citizen. When he’s telling the believers in Philippi to live as citizens, he’s not just telling them to behave in a certain way; he’s also reminding them of the rights they have as citizens of God’s kingdom.
As Americans, we live by the Bill of Rights. “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” You know what it is. When we were at the big banquet in Kosovo, they had a young girl. She learned the national anthem in English. It was really sweet and moving at the big dinner. She sang it. She got it all right except for “the rackets’ red glore.” We can forgive her that.
The Bill of Rights. As American citizens, we have certain rights, and we live out those rights. If people violate those rights, we get upset, and we can go to the court and say, “Hey, people are violating our rights. We have to have this restored.” We could go way down the road talking about the rights of a citizen, but I think a good question to ask or maybe to study through in the Scripture is…What are the rights of a citizen of God’s kingdom? Not just American rights or maybe if you live in Kosovo, Kosovar citizen rights.
What are the rights of those who live in God’s kingdom? Because one of the ways we know the enemy, Satan, in the book of Revelation, they call him the accuser of the brethren, the one who constantly comes in and tries to undercut our rights… “You’re not good. You’re not loved. You’re rejected. You’re going to fail. Your life is a miserable existence. You’ve wasted it.” He comes in just undercutting our rights.
Paul says, “No, no, no. As you’re living as citizens, live out the rights of what it means to be a citizen of God’s kingdom, that you’re loved. God uses everything, brings it around. That God has a purpose for your life. That God loves you, has an identity for you. Live out the life of a citizen in that way.”
What is the Bill of Rights for the citizens of God’s kingdom? It’s incredibly important. Sometimes I think we lose sight of that, just as maybe we lose sight of the privilege we have as American citizens. Most of us are American citizens. Some of us, I know, even have gained American citizenship through the course of our lives. It’s an amazing blessing.
We have relationships with immigrants, refugees who come in from other countries, and they’re studying for the test to become citizens. So they know more about American history than we do. When they get that citizenship, they are so happy. “We’re so happy to be American citizens.” For a lot of us though, we’ve grown up with it. We kind of lose sight of the beauty of the privileges, the rights of an American citizen. Especially when the government is shut down, it’s easily to grumble about being an American. “Oh yeah, well, what does that mean?”
But it’s so beautiful. I really see that. Kosovo as a country was not even officially a nation until 2008, but long before that they’d essentially been overrun by the Serbs. The Serbs were the ones who eventually in ’98 and ’99 came in and just tried to start killing them because they considered them to be less than human.
Bharat, our good friend (some of you guys may have met Bharat) actually went to high school, but he wasn’t allowed to go to a high school in a school building. He had to meet in secret in his living room with a number of other students. I actually met his high school teacher, and we talked about how they had to do school under cover. Why? Well, because as Kosovar Albanians, they didn’t have any rights. They did not have the right to go to school in that setting.
So when they gained their independence and when they were recognized as a true nation and as they gained their citizenship in that country, they love it! It’s still fresh for them. It hasn’t grown tired at all. It’s just so fresh for them. Right now is election season, and so they’ll be electing mayors and parliament people and prime ministers and everything in November.
So while we were there, there was a lot of political campaigning going on. That might have been part of the reason they wanted to bring us as Americans over, to be part of their campaign. We weren’t sure about that, but that was probably part of it. As we were there, we just saw the excitement, the enthusiasm these guys had in exercising their rights as citizens.
The same thing that can happen to us in terms of our own American citizenship, I think it can happen sometimes in our kingdom citizenship, where we lose the freshness and the beauty and the excitement and the clarity of knowing our rights in the kingdom of God. It’s not just rights, but also with citizenship comes responsibility.
It’s interesting in Philippi, we talked about Octavian resettling the whole place. The responsibility of the citizens of Philippi was to make Philippi like a little mini Rome, to reflect the culture of Rome as accurately as possible. So if you go back and you look and you read about what ancient Philippi was like, because it was full of all these Roman citizens, the dress in Philippi looked just like the clothing they wore in Rome.
The language they spoke was just like what they spoke in Rome. The coins they had were just like the ones they had in Rome. The architecture in Philippi was just like what it was like in Rome. The buildings they built were just like what they had in Rome. Their job as citizens, they had rights, but their responsibility was to recreate the culture of Rome in this colony of Philippi.
So when Paul tells the Philippians, “Hey, be citizens. Live according to your rights in the kingdom of God, but also carry out the responsibility,” what’s the responsibility they understand? Well, it’s to recreate the culture of heaven wherever they are. That’s for us too. How do we know the culture of heaven? How do we even know what it’s like? How do we know what the roads and the buildings and the clothing and all the aspects of heavenly life are like? Well, the kingdom, the nature of a kingdom, is defined by the nature of the King.
How do we know what the culture of heaven is like, the culture of the kingdom of God? It’s defined by Jesus. How do we know what Jesus is like? Once again, we have to have an encounter with him. We have to know him. We read about him in the Scripture. We pray. We learn. But there’s something supernatural that happens when we meet the Lord.
It transforms us, and suddenly we are now the ones who are best equipped, most capable, clearest about what the culture of heaven looks like so we can live as citizens worthy of the gospel, displaying, creating that culture of heaven wherever we are.
So look at your life. How is it? Does it look like the culture of heaven? Do you see that colonization of the heavenly realm around you? Or is it the other way? Does it seem like you’ve maybe lost the freshness and the power and the privilege of your citizenship and the world is more pressing in on your life?
Paul uses two more metaphors to develop this idea of citizenship. We don’t really have time to go fully into them, but we’ll hit them briefly. He says one of the ways we’re citizens and we show the world our citizenship is in our unity. The word he uses there in the second half of verse 27, he says, “…I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel…” (Philippians 1:27)
When it says striving side by side, the word there actually is the same word that gives us the word athlete. What he’s talking about here is he really wants these Philippian citizens to be like on the same team. Some of you guys may have played team sports. Growing up, I played a lot of baseball. But I love every sport actually.
If you know what it’s like to play on a team, you know how rotten it can be when one of the players on the team is incredibly selfish. So if you’re playing basketball and you’re playing with that one guy who shoots every time you pass him the ball, you don’t really want to pass him the ball. Then you do pass to him, and he shoots, and he misses. You’re like, “Ugh!” What happens is as a team breaks down internally, you know the game is lost.
If you’ve ever played against a team like that, whether it’s on a baseball field or on the basketball court or whatever it is, soccer, if you’ve ever played against a team that’s breaking down internally because its unity is fractured, you know, “Hey, we’re going to win this thing.” But if you ever play against a team that’s just unified, and they have like one heart and one mind, it’s like everybody knows their job, everybody does their job, then you’re going, “Uh-oh. We’re probably going to lose against these guys.”
Listen to what Paul says, “…striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, and not frightened in anything by your opponents. This is a clear sign to them of their destruction, but of your salvation, and that from God.” (Philippians 1:27-28) He’s saying, “Hey, when we play as a team, when we’re unified, the other team knows they’re headed for destruction. They’re not going to win. They’re going to lose.”
It’s very powerful. Actually the word itself, synathleō, that idea of the athlete comes from the Coliseum, the world where they would have the showdowns, gladiator, or you have the animals that would come in. That’s the sort of idea. That’s what they called athletes. But since most of us haven’t had any experience with Coliseum life fighting lions, I figured it’d be better to talk about basketball.
Here’s the problem though. A lot of times when we think just beyond our local church and we think about, say, just Gwinnett County, for example, and we’ve got all the churches in Snellville and Lilburn (I probably drive past six or seven different churches just from my house to Grace), we don’t necessarily play on the same team with them. It’s almost more like we’re all in the same league competing to be the best church in the league. Do you know what I mean?
I think that would break Paul’s heart. I think sometimes, and I know even in my own mind, it’s like, “Okay, there’s that church over there and that church over there and that church over there.” Rather than seeing them as teammates, I see them more as like opponents. “We’re all in the same league, and I want to win the league. I want Grace to be the best church.” There’s nothing wrong with wanting your church to be the best church, but not at the expense of the other ones, not at the expense of the other communities around.
What Paul is encouraging us here is to think beyond just our local congregations and to understand that the entire body of Christ in Philippi or the body of Christ in Snellville or the body of Christ in Gwinnett or Atlanta is one team. The more we’re able to play as one team, the clearer it is to the forces of darkness that they’re going to lose, that the reality of Christ is going to reign supreme.
Then finally, the last image he gives us. He talks about citizens. He talks about athletes, or sportsmen, if you want to keep the sibilance alive (the “s” sound). Sometimes sibilance can be soporific, putting you to sleep. So I decided athletes. I want you to stay awake. Citizens, sportsmen (or athletes), and then finally sufferers.
There’s one little line in there. He says, “For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake…” (Philippians 1:29) What does it mean to live as a citizen? Well, it has been given, it has been granted to you, not only to believe, but also to suffer.
Now that’s a tough thing. We don’t love talking about suffering. I know David, last week, shared a lot about stories of suffering in other parts of the world. I remember the first time I ever was exposed to firsthand accounts of suffering. We were in Lebanon, and we met these wonderful families. They’d been living in Lebanon, sharing their faith in Muslim settings. One guy we met told a bunch of stories just about how he’d been in jail multiple times, persecuted, suffering and everything else.
This guy had such a wonderful faith. I was listening to it, and I remember I had this thought. I was a young believer at the time, and I thought, “Man, if I’m going to be really spiritual, do I need to seek out some suffering?” because to be honest, I hadn’t really suffered at all up until that point in my life. I thought maybe what it means to be really spiritual is to suffer.
I had this idea in the back of my head. I might need to seek some suffering. But the Bible never tells us to seek suffering. The Bible tells us to seek the will of God. Now as we seek the will of God, there are times when suffering comes. Jesus didn’t seek suffering on the cross; Jesus sought the will of God at Gethsemane. He actually said, “Lord, if there’s any way I could avoid this, if this cup could pass from me, if we could do this another way other than suffering, that would be wonderful, but I’m going to seek your will, not my own.”
In our own lives, when it comes to suffering as believers, the promise in Timothy is that all those who seek to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer. Even Saul, in Acts 9, after he has the encounter with Jesus on the Damascus road, the Lord says, “I’m going to show him how much he must suffer for my name’s sake.”
But suffering is never something to be sought. The will of God is what we seek. The presence of God is what we seek. We want to have encounters with the living God. But if that road of the will of God leads us through seasons of suffering, we can be sure it’s not outside of God’s will. In fact, we can count it as a privilege that God has seen us fit, that he has seen us sturdy enough to sustain the challenge and the testing of suffering.
So when we suffer, we don’t have to go, “O God, why am I suffering?” But as we’re seeking the will of the Lord and he leads us in that way, we go, “Okay, I know I’m walking with the Lord, and it’s getting really tough now. It seems like I’m suffering. It seems like there’s persecution coming up. Thank you, Lord. This is a sign I’m on the right track and you see me as capable, sturdy enough to sustain the suffering.”
That’s what Paul is trying to help them see. Once again, Jesus is the true King as you encounter suffering because you’re seeking the will of God. Don’t be dismayed. It’s actually granted to you. It’s not sought, but given.
So as we respond tonight, we finish this passage and reflect in worship together (it’s a lot that Paul has talked about), do you know what my hope is and as I was preparing and what I was praying for? I just really want us to meet with the Lord tonight. We’ve talked about the power of the encounter with God.
I don’t know. It doesn’t look the same for all of us. It doesn’t all happen at the same time, but just that together tonight as we’re worshiping, we would open our hearts and say, “Lord, we seek you tonight. Lord, we want to draw near to you tonight. Lord, show up in our lives. Speak the word of clarity. Renew our vision of the kingdom of heaven. Lord, impress on us the reality of heaven. Lord, come correct our view of life and death so it aligns with the way you would have us think. Lord, just show up.”
Lord, as we worship, as we bless you, we have Communion here. Through the ages for the Christian faith, this has been a place where people have met with the Lord. The mystery of the broken body in the bread, the mystery of the shed blood in the cup, reminding us of the death of Jesus and the life of Jesus, reminding us that Jesus was among us in the flesh. So powerful. So important. Encourage us.
Let’s come forward. Take Communion. Let’s worship the Lord together. And let’s open our hearts and say, “Lord, just show up. Correct some stuff. Clarify some things. Make some things clear. Speak the words we need to hear. Renew us with the freshness of your kingdom.” Let’s pray.
God, thanks for the way you changed the life of a man named Saul. Thank you, Lord, for the ways you have changed our lives. Lord, I believe every single one of us has been drawn here by you, even tonight. You have worked in our hearts. I ask, God, you would do the next thing of work in our lives.
Lord, that you’d show up, and we’d just have an encounter with you, transforming, meeting with the living God. Lord Jesus, just show up over the preaching of your Word and the response of your people over this Eucharist here, Lord. Just show up in our lives. Set us straight. Renew us. Breathe life upon our souls.